“You’ve got to remember we’re on an island here,” my old friend Nicolas was saying, as unseasonal rains crashed down on Alice Springs, the worst downpour in nine years, and great chocolate-brown currents clogged the usually dry river-bed of the Todd, blocking our way back to our hotel and washing away roads for the moment. […]
It was already clear, in December of 1999, that books were a dying species. Already more people seemed interested in producing novels than consuming them, and when it came to serious works there seemed more fascination with the writer than the writing. Books, I heard from two serious, bewildered editors in New York on the […]
The perfect traveler must be a perfect contradiction. She should be open to almost everything that comes her way, but not too ready to be taken in. He should be worldly, shrewd, his feet firmly on the ground; but he must also have the capacity to give himself over to moments of real wonder. He […]
I got off the overnight train in Mandalay, Burma’s historical city of kings, and instantly there was a swarm of men around me. They were hard for me to tell apart, most of them dressed in white shirts, with wrap-around longhis around their waists, many of them wild-eyed and unshaven after spending all night in […]
So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi. Relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”); workers from villages and rainfalls of marigolds; cousins that no one can quite place and […]
I was staying in India earlier this year, and every time I returned to my room in a semi-luxury hotel, one of the chambermen along the corridor smiled at me sweetly and said, “Sir, sir, I can clean your room?” He had cleaned it only about an hour before, usually, and there was only so […]
The Red Highway begins with a spare, haunting account of the Czech artist Karel Kupka clambering out of a plane and (as the book’s first sentence has it) stepping “for the first time into the elusive world of Arnhem Land.” Born in the last year of World War I, and growing up in a cultured […]
I walked into the center of old Kyoto not long ago and found myself in a scene from a Hiroshige painting. Huge floats containing ancestral treasures stood on the narrow lanes at the heart of the ancient capital, while rows of lanterns bobbed above the wooden houses. Old men played piercing melodies on bamboo flutes, […]
“Dream–nothing!” is one of the many things the Fourteenth Dalai Lama regularly says to large audiences that startles the unprepared. Just before I did an onstage conversation at New York Town’s Hall with him this month, he told me, “If I had magical powers, I’d never need an operation!” and broke into guffaws as he […]
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her […]
